


home is a four-letter word

by Ericine



Series: Trust Exercise [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: ...or is she?, AU, Aftermath, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Friendship, Gen, Home, Ode to the American South, Other, Recovery, Vala is Human, friendfic, partners in crime, references to child drug trafficking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 13:45:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3652629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ericine/pseuds/Ericine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's spring semester, and college sophomore Vala Mal Doran is trying to start her life. Little does she know that her junior roommate Cameron Mitchell's going to have to restart his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home is a four-letter word

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for references to child drug trafficking. Slight, but it's there. Vala is bisexual. There's a healthy amount of flirting on all fronts (it's college), but no real endgame ships. The heart of this story is Vala and Cam's friendship.
> 
> The next installment to this series, a fulfillment of a promise I made long ago but did not forget (alternatively: the meme prompt that launched a many-sectioned fic). The pace is interesting, but I find that Vala doesn't tell stories conventionally, especially inside her own head.

**Small**

Vala had told Cameron the truth. She can stay here, and she doesn’t have anything to worry about anymore, but all of that’s contingent upon the next few months, and once she sleeps off her shock—she’s never used an innocent person in one of her jobs before. It’s one of the few rules she won’t break. And yet—

And yet, there he was all semester, never asking, never _speaking_ , just holding his hands out in an offer for help, his vulnerability his own proof for his capability.

So, she took his offer, and she’s still trying to figure out if she needs to forgive herself (if she even _can be forgiven_ for this if it turns out that she’s actually done something wrong). In the meantime, though, she has things to do. 

So, Vala turns down Cameron’s offer to spend winter break with his family, which makes little lines of worry break out on the top of his head, but he doesn’t ask any questions (he never does, and that will never stop overwhelming her, making her chest want to reach out and _hold_ ). She lets him drop her off in Louisiana, though, on his way to Texas, because it’s closer to where she needs to go, and she knows Cameron. He needs to feel useful.

“Don’t go,” he tells her, when he parks at one of the gas stations on I-10. He doesn’t mean _don’t go now_ , because he’s never asked her where or why she goes. He means _don’t go forever_ , and it stings her, the part of him that thinks that she will, that she’ll go away and never come back. He’s not _wrong_. She knows she can, even after all of this. Running’s like ripping duct tape off. Gods, it hurts, it leaves pieces behind, and parts of her get torn away, but she can do it (she can always do it)—though she finds herself lately wondering if the pain is worth it.

Instead, she smirks and smiles. “Leave you, dear Cameron?” she grins, widening her eyes in mock shock and amusement. “My heart would _break_.”

She doesn’t lie to him, and she suspects, by now, that he’d be able to see right past her if she did—not all the way through ( _never_ all the way through, because that’s different—that’s a matter of life-or-death, and Vala’s stayed alive this long, hard-wired for survival and nothing else) but _enough_. 

He triple-checks that they have each others’ numbers (he’s still kicking himself for not having her number in December, which Vala just finds silly—she’s been using burner phones for years, and this is probably the longest she’s ever kept a number), then drives off. Vala watches him leave, then walks to the coffee shop across the street, orders the largest latte on the menu (she doesn’t like coffee, but she likes places with personality, and she knows that New Orleans is a good place for her to be—it makes sense to Cameron, and it makes sense to her, and if she didn’t have business to attend to, she’d have asked if they could go together and bring along Samantha), and sits down to plan.

When Vala was younger, her dream had always been to _exist_ as little as possible, which sounds ridiculous and doesn’t capture the way she felt anyway, which is why she never brings it up. They’d cut her hair short back then, anything that made her look more sympathetic, and she’d stand there, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe with the powder bombs sitting in her stomach, the bags that she swallowed because that was her job. 

Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t think too much. 

She knows overdose is a terrible way to die. She’s seen it happen. That’s why she and the other children don’t become friends. 

She hears a brass band in the distance and runs a hand through her hair. She’s free of that now—most importantly, free to choose. She has to go to Albuquerque. There are things for her to do there—warehouses to close, things to put in storage, leverage to put into place (just as a precaution). She has to do that tomorrow, though.

She spends her day uptown, sending pictures to Cameron of parades, dogs in costumes, and various coffee shops ( _let me share this with you, let me show you that I don’t want to leave you_ ).

She doesn’t check her phone until later, when she’s sitting in a bar (the kind Cameron would like, the kind that has a real _jukebox_ ) flirting with the girl across from her (she hadn’t been expecting to sleep for free tonight, but she’s not going to turn the opportunity down). He’s sent her a picture of the open road in front of him, sunset over Texas.

The picture fits. Cameron belongs in the _sky_ , in open spaces. Vala does too. 

She kisses the girl later on a balcony as fireworks she can hear but can’t see ring out in the distance (they’re surrounded by flashing lights, though), and she wakes up warm before she pays cash for the Greyhound to New Mexico.

 

 **Haven**

Albuquerque gains her enough extra money for a bus to San Diego. She calls Samantha from a Phoenix rest stop.

“Vala?” Samantha asks, and her voice sounds a little muffled. Vala imagines she’s texting Cameron as she speaks. _Vala’s on the phone. She sounds okay._

“Yes, I was in the area, and I was wondering if you could find in the kindness of your heart a spot for me to come spend Christmas with you?” 

“Christmas? What? I mean, yes, of course. Where are you? Do you need me to come get you?”

“I’m still a state away, sweetheart,” says Vala, smiling in spite of herself. “Just give me an address. I’ll come to you.”

“Vala, no. I’ll come get you. Airport or bus stop?”

“Sam—”

“Seriously, it’s just me, Mark, Dad, and Daniel. I’m guessing bus stop?” she asks, and Vala suddenly understands the way that Cameron describes her voice—it _illuminates_.

“Who’s Daniel?" 

Samantha laughs. “You don’t know him, but he knows you.”

Daniel, it turns out, is a provocatively gorgeous human about Samantha’s age who doesn’t have a provocative bone in his body. He’s squinting in the kind of way that makes Vala think that he’s usually wearing glasses, though she doesn’t know why he decided not to wear them today. He’s wearing nice clothes, jeans and a nondescript jacket, but he doesn’t look comfortable, and Vala figures that Samantha probably does the shopping in their relationship—though she has no idea what that relationship is yet. Vala makes an immediate claim for the front seat, but he looks like he was going to sit in the back all along. If Vala wasn’t mistaken, he’d sat in the back seat on the way over, too. 

Samantha gets out, supposedly to help Vala with her bag (Daniel gets out too, looking—not annoyed but perturbed with a side of bewildered—and it’s clear that they’ve argued over who was going to do this on the way over), but Vala’s wearing a backpack that fits a week’s worth of clothes (a dress, a pair of jeans, a handful of shirts—she’s an expert at doing laundry at rest stops), so she hugs Vala instead, and Vala jumps up into her arms, and Samantha just _laughs_ , joy and relief (it occurs to Vala that Samantha didn’t think she was coming back either, and that hurts and heals, but it heals more than it hurts), and Vala finds herself struggling to hold back tears because it’s been to long since she’s felt Samantha and Cameron’s texture of comfort _._

“It’s a bit of a drive,” says Samantha. “I hope you don’t mind.” 

“I don’t mind if Daniel doesn’t mind,” smiles Vala, settling herself into the front seat. What’s one more day of road?

Daniel makes a noncommittal noise from the back seat, and Vala turns around.

“I’m going to call you Daniel, I hope you know that,” she says. “Even if you’re like your other friends and prefer to go by ‘Dam’ or something silly like that.” Samantha snorts, and Daniel looks even more bewildered. “Have you called Cam yet?” Vala asks, and Sam shakes her head. 

“I think he’d rather hear from you about this instead of me,” she says softly, and there’s a question in her eyes, but she respects Vala’s space enough to not ask her n front of Daniel.

Vala’s good at many unrelated things, but one of those things just happens to be keeping conversations from entering awkward territory. “Well, enough about me. That would be _selfish_ ,” she says, and Sam turns back to the road, used to Vala’s change in tones by now. “Tell me how you and this strapping young man met.”

Daniel’s eyebrows raise at that, high enough to probably clear the ceiling of the car, but he says nothing. Vala decides that it’s interesting, hearing Samantha doing the talking for once.

She talks _a lot_ , more than Vala’s ever heard her talk. She and Daniel are apparently research partners working on an interdisciplinary project (Daniel is apparently studying linguistics and history, which, yes, is pretty much the opposite of Sam, who’s about as hard science as they come). They were picked after from the same research class and had met each other in study groups but had never talked before their project. They were excited, hoping to finish it before graduation.

“What’s it about?” Vala asks, before they get a chance to ask her what she studies.

Samantha giggles, and Vala’s not used to hearing it. She likes the sound. “Outer space,” she says, almost at a whisper. Vala’s stomach drops, and she can’t decide whether it’s a good or bad thing. “Anyway, Daniel didn’t have Christmas plans, so I asked him to come spend it with us. We have a—a quiet house, usually,” she says, with a little bit of difficulty. Vala recognizes it as the same kind of difficulty she experiences (she doesn’t think she shows it anymore) when Cameron asks her about her family.

She looks up at that point and is surprised to catch Daniel’s eye in the rearview mirror; he knows it too.

“Mark kind of keeps to himself,” Samantha’s saying, and Vala tunes back in, “but I don’t know, he has a girlfriend this year, so he’s being social but just not in the house. Dad keeps to himself too, and he’s working right up until the actual holiday, so we can do whatever you want while you’re here. I don’t know if you want to shop or anything. Daniel’s mostly been reading, but I figure we can at least go out to eat while you’re here.”

Vala looks up into the rearview mirror again until Daniel realizes she’s staring at him. “I’ll do whatever he wants to do,” she says. “I rarely meet such fascinating people.”

Samantha’s eyes flick over to Vala, and Vala barely registers a flash of suspicion (she’s impressed) and back to the road. “Cam’s rubbing off on me,” she says. “I’ve never been the holiday haven before. Next thing you know, I’ll be talking like a Carolina belle.” She drags out the “I” in “Carolina,” trying to replicate the accent but not quite getting there. Vala laughs in appreciation anyway. 

When she catches Daniel’s eye in the backseat again (she doesn’t have to try to get his attention this time), he’s smiling.

 

**Adoption**

“You’re at Sam’s,” Cameron says, slowly, like he’s trying to work out a math problem. The background sounds like he’s at Dollar Night at the Cinderella Bar, which sounds pretty accurate for Christmas at the Mitchells’.

“Yes,” Vala says primly. Samantha’s taken her out for dinner (Daniel had opted to stay at the house and go to bed early), but they’re waiting for their table, and Samantha had handed Vala her phone and informed her that she wasn’t sitting down at the table until she went outside and told Cameron what was happening.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“You kind of scared me for a while,” says Cameron. “Also, you’re probably going to have to come around here and make things up to Mama, because she’s pretty worried sick about you." 

Vala’s brow furrows. “About me?" 

“Mama’s adopted you,” says Cameron, like this was something she should have known already. “I’m pretty much in the doghouse for not tying you up and taking you back here with us.” Vala really doesn’t know what to say to that. “It’ll be fine, Vala. Everything’s fine.” He sounds easy, suddenly, all the worry from his voice gone, the first cool air that hits her legs after throwing off a blanket in summer. “Do you need to go?” He chuckles. “I don’t want to keep you from Sam. This is probably the most interesting Christmas she’s ever had.” 

Vala had asked Cameron about Daniel—Cameron hadn’t told her much more than “he helped us find you the night you went away,” and Vala figures that’s probably all Cameron knows about him, but that’s not the reason she’s called.

“I mean, I do have to go, but—wait!” She can already hear the noise getting louder, the little cousins shouting in their solidarity to get “Cam-Cam” to give them piggyback rides. “I really did have things to do. I would have come after that—tell your mother that. I just—” 

“Vala,” says Cameron, and his voice is pleading, half to her and half to the three kids that have surely jumped on his back by now.

“I came here for you,” says Vala. “Sam doesn’t spend Christmas with you, so I came here to be with her because you couldn’t.” She’s never used Cam’s name for Sam before.

There’s more muffled shouting, Cameron yelling _wait, wait, hold on_ , and he’s back on the phone. “Goddammit, Vala,” he says softly, but his voice is full of affection.

“I’ll come with her to you for New Years,” she says. In the background, she hears someone yell “Aunt Vala!”, and it’s _jarring_.

Samantha’s nursing the menu and trying to subtly fend off the attention of the waiter when Vala walks back in, slides into the booth on her knees, and slides her arm around her shoulders, sitting so that her legs drape over Samantha’s lap. “Oh, good, we’re ready to order,” she says. “I’m _positively starving_.” The waiter looks disappointed, and Samantha’s smirking out of the corner of Vala’s eye.

“You know, I’m not big on people defending my honor,” Samantha says.

Vala shrugs one shoulder, letting her hair fall over her face, winking conspiratorially. “I know, sweetheart, but he was being such a nuisance. I can’t resist." 

Two club sandwiches later, they’re working on a bottle of wine together (Sam wants to take it home and finish it later, and Vala won’t hear it).

“So,” says Vala, using her juicy gossip voice. “Tell me about Daniel.”

Samantha sighs, her eyes go all starry, and a flash of something dark tingles in Vala’s chest. “We’re like intellectual _soulmates_ ,” Samantha sighs. “Like, I can’t explain it. He’s brilliant and kind of a pain in the ass, but he just _gets it_ , you know? It’s so sad what happened to his parents—they’re both dead, you know, but I’d let him tell you that for himself if you want.” 

“I’m glad he has you,” says Vala.

“Oh, but it’s not like that,” says Samantha. “Seriously, he’s like another brother of mine. Kind of like you’re my sister, kind of like that.” Vala takes another sip of wine to hide her reaction to that. “We— _I_ —I mean, we’re all really glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here.” She looks down into her wine glass, which is empty. Vala extends her hand, takes the glass, and refills it.

“Um,” says Samantha, and Vala notices the thickness in her voice. It’s not like her. “It’s been kind of a rough year for me. A really close friend of mine died, which is why I’ve been making so many trips over to where you were. Um, I don’t really make friends with girls. I kind of always get along better with boys, and just—” If Vala had been the kind of person who carried tissues, she would have handed her a tissue, but she’s not, so she quietly picks up her glass of wine and clicks it against Samantha’s. They sip together. “Her name was—is—Janet,” says Samantha. “And then I met you, and I was afraid that we weren’t going to see you again without knowing what happened—” She’s tearing up then, so she stops, looks up to the ceiling, blinks, and composes herself. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“Alright, you win.”

“What?”

“We’re taking the wine to go, or else we’re going to be tragic messes all over this restaurant that’s convinced that we’re a couple.”

Mark’s out, Samantha’s father’s in bed, and Daniel’s up when they get back to the house. Vala’s sure now that Daniel’s cut from the same kind of cloth Cameron and Samantha are—he’d absolutely opted out of dinner so that she and Samantha could talk. Samantha holds up the wine bottle to him in greeting and gestures to the backyard. He follows.

“Do you drink?” asks Vala.

“I’m a hermit, not straightedge,” says Daniel. “There’s a difference.” Vala rolls her eyes.

It’s windy but not too cold in Samantha’s backyard. Vala lies back in the grass and listens to them tell her about Janet, a person who, much like all of Cameron’s friends, sounds larger than life (even though Cameron’s only met Janet once), a woman who saved people (apparently always saving people—from choking, from near drowning, from anaphylactic shock) and seemed to Vala (and this was becoming a theme these days) to be larger than life. 

Samantha falls asleep in the middle of a sentence. Daniel looks over and chuckles. “She does that a lot.” 

“We should probably move her inside,” says Vala.

Daniel shrugs. “In a minute. I think she likes it out here.” He gestures to the sky. “Stars, you know.”

“Are you coming for New Years?” asks Vala.

Daniel leans back on the heels of his hands and looks up at the sky. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I wasn’t here. What about you?" 

“If I wasn’t here?” asks Vala. She narrows her eyes. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

 

**Ceremony**

Christmas reminds Vala of an old television show—orderly, precise, the opposite of the Mitchells. She decides that she doesn’t like Samantha in an orderly environment—it just feels wrong, somehow, even though Samantha bakes cookies and puts on the family movie— _It’s a Wonderful Life_ —with the ease of someone who’s been doing this her whole life. Everyone is perfectly cordial, but Vala’s glad to leave. 

Daniel does come along to New Years, to Vala’s delight. Daniel’s _interesting_. She catches him looking at her when he thinks she’s not paying attention, but it doesn’t seem to be driven by attraction. He looks at her like she’s a puzzle to solve, like something he hasn’t weighed for judgment yet.

When he’s sleeping in the back seat on the drive to Cameron’s, Samantha tells Vala that he doesn’t sleep very much at school.

“He’s always trying to figure something out,” she says. “It’s like he just works until he passes out, then gets up and works some more. If he doesn’t get the chance to sleep, he just drinks more coffee.”

Vala’s poking him, and he’s not stirring. “I guess this is him on break,” says Samantha, raising an eyebrow at Vala. She takes her hands away. “I never figured him for a heavy sleeper, but we’re always in class, you know?”

Mama Mitchell (she instructs Vala to call her _Wendy_ , but Vala’s noticed everyone call her Mama Mitchell, and she doesn’t object when Vala joins in) fusses when she finds out that there’s another person sleeping in the house, but that only seems to make her happier.

Vala gets involved in a few Roman candle wars ( _fun_ , but she knows Mama Mitchell’s going to come out and protest, so she slips away before Mama can rip everyone in the group a new one). Daniel turns in at eleven, and Vala finds herself slipping away from Cameron and the rest of the group fifteen minutes before midnight, climbing the tree that’s been cut just far enough away to keep it from being a fire escape (or just an escape) out of the second-story windows but makes a great pathway to the roof. She rings in midnight with shouts below her and fireworks above her. It feels wonderful.

 

**Restless**

The dorm room feels too small when Vala returns to campus. She rearranges all of the furniture. Cameron’s bed ends up flush under the window, while Vala takes the wall by the door. It helps until she lies down. Then she itches everywhere and can’t sleep. She tries to lie still and ignore it, but she finds her fingers tapping against the mattress.

During the day, she attends class—not that she has to—she’s had it arranged to where she never needs to (not that she’s going to be learning anything she doesn’t already know). Her foot taps under her desk.

In a way, she likes class. The people around her are hopelessly unengaged and dull, but she likes the way they seem to go on and on—they seem to fill her time—or at least make time longer. She brings a box of colored pencils to class and sketches outfits in her notebook.

She’s survived the first week of school and is sitting on the floor in front of her closet, taking a pair of scissors to a pile of her shirts when she hears his footfalls down the hall—steady, heavy on his heels. She hears the door open, the footfalls stop in their doorway.

She wonders if he’s capable of walking like she does—quick, on his toes, noiseless. She doubts it.

She finishes cutting the shirtsleeve and makes a show of placing everything back into her closet before she turns around, folding her legs under her, arms bracing her on either side. It’s a defensive position, one that she knows is only for show. The ground is never a good place for defense. 

“Say it,” she says. Cameron remains silent. She sighs and allows her head fall forward (her neck cries out in protest—she didn’t know she was tense). “Say something or move. I can’t cut things with you standing there in the doorway blocking my light.”

“The light’s right above you,” he says. “I’m not in it at all.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just because my eyes are in the front of my head doesn’t mean I can’t see you. You take up space.” He sits down in the doorway. “Now, you’re just pitying me.”

He rubs his hands over his knees and sighs, the same sigh he uses after his first sip of a new beer. “So, what do you want me to do? What’s the right thing to do?”

He’s never asked her that before. Why the hell would he ask her that now? Vala finds that she can’t meet his eyes. Hers are too cold, and his are full of kindness. She wants badly to take her limbs _in_ , to curl up and simultaneously put distance between her and everything. She stares at the floor and tries to quiet her thoughts. 

She keeps her arms where they are, carpet burning into the heels of her palms. She’s pushing into the floor, and the burn in her arms is just enough to keep her in place.

She hears his intake of breath, the sign that he’s going to speak before he speaks, the sign that he’s going to say something warm.

“Let’s go for a drive,” Cameron says.

She forces herself not to look out the window while they’re driving, concentrating instead on her cell phone (she hopes the weight of her head hanging forward fixes whatever the gods she’s done to the back of her neck). Between Candy Crush, Dots, and Pinterest, she’s able to keep her fingers moving enough to where she doesn’t climb out of the damn car. It doesn’t stop her from knowing where they are though (three turns on smooth ground then speeding up means the freeway—they’re headed just north of northwest, with no sign of stopping).

Cameron doesn’t speak—just asks her once if she wants the windows open, and _gods yes_ , she does. The wind tangles her hair, and Vala doesn’t make an attempt to fix it—it looks the same combed or not anyway.

They must have been driving for at least two hours, and he doesn’t show any signs of turning around. She turns to him (the wind immediately sets to work on tangling the back of her hair).

“You planning on stopping anytime soon?” she asks. 

“Nope,” says Cameron.

“You’re going to need gas at some point.”

“We’ll stop when you want to stop.”

“Stop.”

It’s the quickest, smoothest stop Vala’s ever experienced, but then again, it’s Cameron, who’s the strangest embodiment of a man who’s one with his machines. He takes off his seatbelt and steps outside the car. Vala follows and finds that air’s never felt so good against her skin, even when it was blowing through half her hair at (what must have been) at least eighty miles an hour.

The shoulder’s wide, and Vala joins Cameron at the front bumper of the car, watching the cars zip by. 

“I’m not really sure what to do now,” she says.

The statement stretches out into the space around them, miles of road and trees and overgrown grass and sky. Infinite space that can never be filled. Vala doesn’t know why, but it gives her comfort.

“You’ll figure it out,” says Cameron. “And if you want, I’ll help you.”


End file.
